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So I had to do paper for my English class, and I also had this massive project in another class so my thumb drive had my English paper and my other project, I had to compile the data for my project with my group and used some cheap-*** school Gateway computer, and now my Mac wont read it and my HP wont read it, I need help, I need the USB drive NOW and dont have time to re-write my 5 page paper. How do I reformat it so it will work on either computer, but not erase the data on it?
PLEASE HELP!!

Changing the format of the thumb drive won't help you at all. Almost all thumb drives out there under 16GB are, in fact, in FAT32 format. On top of that, you are misinformed that you can change the format of the drive without erasing it. Na ga ha pen.

What's ACTUALLY happened is that the directory of the thumb drive has been damaged. This is almost ALWAYS due to user error (not properly ejecting the drive from Mac or Windows before physically removing the drive). I have also seen occasions where the PC or the thumb drive itself was at fault and not the user, but these are extremely rare. 99.99% of the time, the user forgot to properly dismount/eject the thumb drive before removing it.

I hope this helps. Not that it's helpful at the moment, but for future reference vital documents that only exist on a thumb drive is pretty risky, so I always like to back up the thumb drive's contents either on a hard drive or a "cloud" drive if possible. If you are a current (Lion) Mac user, iCloud works great for this. For older OS X systems, Dropbox or Box or S3 or some other cloud system is available too.